I hope you’ve finished building your Japanese Barn in FarmVille, as the developer has released yet another community building project in the game. This one comes in the form of a Beehive, and we have everything you need to know to build your own.

The next time you login, you’ll be met with an introductory pop-up, letting you know that you have a free beehive base waiting for you in your gift box.

Sure enough, each user has been given one, and you can place the Beehive wherever you’d like on your farm in order to officially begin the event. Once placed, you’ll receive yet another pop-up, letting you know that you can post about your new Beehive on your wall in the form of a news post. As this is a structure that you’ll need your friends to help build, this would be a good idea – let them know that you are trying to build a Beehive, and they’ll likely be willing to help you do so.

For the process of building the Beehive proper, you’ll need to collect 50 ingredients (technically 49, as one is given to all users for free) – 10 each of five different items: Smokers, Beeswax, Wooden Boards, Nails, and Bricks.

As usual, there are multiple ways to go about earning said ingredients. First, for the free, but time-consuming way, you can ask your friends to send you ingredients by looking inside your Beehive and clicking “ask for more” under any ingredient in particular. This takes you to a reverse of the game’s free gifts page, that will allow you to send “gift requests” to your friends. However, instead of traditional gift requests, that would see your friends receiving free items, you’ll be sending out requests for help, that, once clicked, will actually see your friends sending you an item, as opposed to the other way around. It should be noted that if you can convince a non-FarmVille player to send you ingredients (that is, convince them to add the game), they will be able to send you groups of three ingredients, rather than single units.

As has become the norm with these new building projects, each user has access to sending two items associated with the Beehive from the game’s free gifts page. In my case, as we can see below, I have access to sending Smokers, and Honeybees proper, which, while not ingredients to build the Beehive, will come in handy once the hive is complete (we’ll get to the Beehive’s exact function in a bit).

If you lack the FarmVille neighbors necessary to send you the ingredients the old-fashioned way, you can also spend some of your hard earned Farm Cash on finishing the Beehive in one click, by simply entering into the Beehive’s menu (click on it and hit “Look Inside”) and clicking on the “Complete Now” button. As the building takes 50 ingredients to complete, your cost will be 50 minus the amount of ingredients you managed to collect on your own.

So, you’ve gone through the process of collecting 50 ingredients, and your Beehive is now standing tall on your farm. Now what? Thanks to a new FarmVille loading screen, we can see that the Beehive’s function will be one of great importance, especially to those who are out to master all available crops in the game.

To put it simply – once you finish your Beehive, you’ll be able to first “find the queen bee” (we’ll be sure to give you all of the details about finding the queen bee as they become available) and can then grow your swarm of bees. These bees can apparently be sent out to pollinate your crops, with pollinated crops offering a better chance at finding bushels when harvested. These bushels, if you recall, can be used to double the amount of mastery points you receive when harvesting the matching crop, so this is a great upgrade to have.

Make sure to head over to your farm to start building your own Beehive, and feel free to discuss this event, or anything FarmVille related, in our new forums.

Note: As of this writing, there is a browser-related issue that is causing the FarmVille gameplay screen to lock for some users when clicking on the “Look Inside” link to view the inside of their Beehive (your ingredient progress screen). This, again, is a browser – not game – related issue, and can be resolved by simply emptying your browser’s cache.